This is for the gamblers, the risk-takers, the ones who live for today and say screw tomorrow, the ones who forsake the future's comfortable could-be to seize what's right here, right now, to look opportunity in the eye and vow they'll wring it dry or not live to see the sunrise.

If you've ever thrown caution to the wind and taken a chance, a real, true chance — on love, on school, on whatever else, no matter if you won or got burned in the end — there's one team you need to be rooting for as summer bears down on fall and Major League Baseball approaches its home stretch leading up to the World Series.

The Oakland A's, whose decrepit home stadium sometimes leaks sewage and may well have them skedaddling San Francisco's gritty stepchild of a city sooner rather than later. The Oakland A's, whose payroll consistently ranks among the lowest in the major leagues. The Oakland A's, whose greatest highlight of the past few years may have been Moneyball, the 2011 Hollywood flick starring Brad Pitt.

Pitt played A's general manager Billy Beane, showing how the front-office wunderkind used guile, statistical innovation and pragmatism to build a respectable squad in a small market on a small budget. If that film portrayed a front-office gambler making logical, modest bets to hang around the table longer than expected, Beane has now pushed every last one of his chips to the center, changed his middle name to Cojones and gone, as they say, all-in.

Yoenis Céspedes, a Cuban slugger and back-to-back champion of the MLB Home Run Derby with charisma to match his impressive power, is one of Oakland's best and most popular players. He's a truly marketable potential superstar on a team that typically goes overlooked in the national consciousness.

Well, he was.

Then Beane shocked the East Bay and baseball world at large by trading him to the Boston Red Sox for ace pitcher Jon Lester on July 31, the final day MLB allows teams to swap players.

When his current contract ends, Céspedes will likely command more money than the A's can shell out — but that's not until 2016, so it would have been safe to keep him around for at least another year. Lester, conversely, is a free agent after this season and likely nothing more than a rented tux Oakland hopes can help sneak it into the big dance. Many predict Lester will return to Boston in just a few short months; he even favorited tweets suggesting as much hours after the big trade.

So surprising was Beane's ballsy move that the A's marketing department was left with 10,000 Céspedes T-shirts for a promotional giveaway scheduled for Saturday, two days after the MLB trade deadline. Why would Beane do this? The answer is simple: The A's are the best team in baseball this year, record-wise, despite having the league's 25th-highest payroll. If they are going to win a World Series under Beane's legendary reign, this is in all likelihood the year it will happen. Boom or bust, baby.

The miracle of Beane's tenure isn't that the A's have been great; it's that they've been decent despite long odds. They've made the playoffs six times since he took over as GM in 1998, but won just a single playoff series. Lester's probably-abbreviated stint robs the A's of a star and fan-favorite in Céspedes. But it gives them a chance to escape charming decency and finally taste greatness again after making back-to-back-to-back World Series in 1988, 1989 and 1990, winning in '89.

And even Hollywood's silver screen can't immortalize you like a World Series ring.

With new additions Lester, Jeff Samardzija and Jason Hammel — the latter two acquired in a blockbuster trade on July 4 — on top of Scott Kazmir and Sonny Gray, the A's have hands-down the majors' most fearsome pitching staff. That lineup is in theory more than enough to get Oakland through any seven-game series. Pundits across America now deem them World Series favorites, a preposterously unusual position for the underdog ball club from underdog Oakland.

Of course, this all cost the A's some promising prospects in addition to Céspedes. They'll likely find themselves not sucking, but returning to normal solidness-but-not-greatness next season. Beane didn't outright mortgage the franchise's future in July, as some breathlessly exclaimed after the Lester trade — but he did do something just a couple steps short of that. It's Oakland's best shot — maybe their last shot, before leaving for a shinier stadium in a bigger town — at transcendence and Beane knows this.

Sports let us live vicariously through teams and athletes, following heartbreak, triumph and emotional swings tangibly but from a safe distance — much like with music or film. We find resonance in stories and scores and narratives that, ultimately, mean little. But we feel them in ways that mean everything.

So if you've ever considered going truly all-in on anything — from a boyfriend or girlfriend, to a dream job with high risk but untold potential reward, to your fantasy life in the Tuscan countryside — Billy Beane's club from Oakland is the team whose story you need to follow now. Will they deliver us a tale of vicarious victory, or an empathy-stirring glorious failure?

We'll find out in the coming months, but one thing's already certain: Even if these A's fall short of their World Series goal, their defeat will come with a certain beauty — all-in, like a lover who puts their heart on the line — that winners can never know.

[Note: This writer's dad took him to those aforementioned '89 and '90 World Series, and this writer has spent many a sun-baked afternoon at the decrepit Coliseum, but none of those facts in any way shaped the tone of this column. What the A's are doing is just cool.]

Mashable
is a global, multi-platform media and entertainment company. Powered by its own proprietary technology, Mashable is the go-to source for tech, digital culture and entertainment content for its dedicated and influential audience around the globe.